天下制覇

But bitches ain’t one of them.

Impressions:

Eh. It was an episode. It could have used more Yamada (what couldn’t?), fewer cliched bad gags (what couldn’t?), and more of Yamada rocking the pink sweater in stockings (what couldn’t?). Once the storm clouds rolled in after two simply awful hand-holdus interruptus moments, it was plain to see how this was going to end. Of course, we also got the montage of Inami’s best hits, pun unfortunately intended, but at least it was only maybe thirty seconds long. Still, I don’t like being forced to relive the worst parts of the show in its eleventh hour. Like usual, Yamada stole the show, although Satou and his mastery over his own harem came pretty close, even if Souma ended up in it somehow.

The only other real thing of note was the introduction of Matsumoto, who may as well be the reincarnation of Momose Kurumi or Nami Hito without Kurumi’s kicking curves. Those normality jokes, for and against, are so old hat to me at this point. Even Night Wizard did them better, but it did have skeletons and immortal little girls threatening normalcy. Then again, Yamada may very well be an Eternal herself. The point is that she wasn’t particularly amusing, and tossing her in during literally the last ten minutes of the show is bizarre at best.

Final thoughts below.

Final Thoughts:

Unlike a lot of shows this season, this got markedly better for awhile after a very rocky and poor start. I’m placing that firmly on the shoulders of Yamada though, who is a delightfully charming and fairly unique character that adds a dimension to this show that it sadly lacks otherwise, creativity. I’m perfectly fine with accepting that it’s possible that I’ve simply seen too many shows like this at this point, but Working abuses cliches like it has a bad crack habit and unlike, say, GA Art Design, doesn’t deliver the jokes at a fast enough pace to keep you distracted from the bad ones. 

A-1 did a solid job on the production at least. It was far from impressive, but I can’t recall any times where things got bad. Sufficiency is a perfectly acceptable bar to shoot for. The OP is a parasitic mind worm too, although the rest of the music is pretty forgettable. Basically all of the characters are just caricactures though that repeat the same few jokes ad nauseam. Demon King and Angel Beats tried to hide that by having enormous casts and it sort of worked. Here though, with a very small cast, there are more issues.

It’s not a bad show though. I wouldn’t call it highly recommendable, but you could do worse. If you haven’t seen these jokes before, then you’ll probably have a much higher opinion of the humor here than me. After awhile, it got more fun to write about the show than actually watch it, but that’s a very blogger/tainted perspective, so don’t put too much stock in it. Yamada alone makes me glad that I stuck with it past the awful opening episodes and weathered the bad Inami times. The Claw was just icing.